Threading the Needle
by embroiderama
Summary: 15 year old Sam is sidelined from hunting, and he discovers a new way to help protect his father and brother.


Title: Threading the Needle

Author: embroiderama

Characters: Sam, Dean, John (gen)

Rating: PG

Warnings: none

Spoilers: minor for the first season

Word Count: 3,900

Disclaimer: None of the Winchesters belong to me, alas.

Summary: Sam had never thought of sewing as women's work.

Notes: Thank you to wpadmirer for the very kind beta. This is dedicated to my paternal grandfather who took up latch-hook with a vengeance when he had knee and hip surgery.

* * *

The dip and slide of a needle and thread--Sam had never thought of sewing as women's work. He'd seen Dean's hand, steady as it was on the trigger of a rifle, guiding a fine filament through Dad's skin to stitch gashes closed, stop the flow of blood. He'd seen Dad hunched over a ripped pair of pants or a shirt that hadn't been grown out of yet, sewing up busted seams with sturdy black or white thread. Serviceable, solid stitches holding things together.

When Sam fell, just in time to miss the exams at the end of ninth grade, there wasn't anything to be stitched closed. When he flew off his bike, he heard the crack in his leg seconds before the pain hit, but there wasn't any blood. At the hospital, he got a cast covering three-quarters of his leg, and the doctor said he had to rest so that the bone would knit. They left town a week later, Sam's leg stretched out along the back seat of the Impala. Most of the ride to Pastor Jim's passed in a haze for Sam, sleeping or staring out the window at the blur of passing farmland, everything softened by the painkillers.

At Jim's, Sam spent most of his day in an easy chair in the living room, reading or watching one of the five available TV channels while Dean and Dad went off on hunting trips four or five days at a stretch. Most of the time, Jim was working in the house or next door in the church, close enough for Sam to call him if he needed something to drink or a hand getting to the bathroom without breaking his other leg, but one Wednesday morning Jim let Sam know that one of his parishioners was coming over to keep an eye on him while Jim went out on business.

Sam had imagined that it would be an older lady, somebody who would bring him cookies maybe and fold up the basket full of clean laundry that Jim had left next to the easy chair. When Jim walked back into the living room followed by a short, slim girl around Dean's age, Sam wished desperately that he could stand up and walk out of the room without causing a major commotion. He hadn't had a real shower in weeks, and he hated getting somebody to help him balance in front of the sink to wash his hair, so his whole head felt greasy. His legs looked stupid sticking out of his ratty old shorts, one leg in a huge cast, the other just naked and skinny.

"Sam, this is Anna." Jim caught Sam's eye, and Sam tried to silently telegraph his panic, but Jim just smiled. "Anna, Sam."

"Hey, Sam." Anna flashed a small smile, her eyes dark and sharp in her pale face, and then pulled her backpack off her shoulder and sat down on the couch.

"Hey," Sam answered, feeling lame in more ways than one.

Pastor Jim left, promising to be back in time for Anna to get home for dinner, and then they were alone. Sam looked down at his mismatched legs. "Thanks for…um…"

"I don't mind." Anna kicked off her sneakers and folded her legs up onto the couch. "I've been home from college for a week, and my sister is driving me crazy. Besides, I'm trying to get this project done for my mom's birthday, and I don't want her to see."

"What kind of project?"

Anna unzipped her backpack and fished out a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with paper and fabric and colorful bundles of thread. "Um, cross-stitch? It's kind of weird, I guess, but I like making things, and it keeps me from getting too bored. I take the bus home from college, and that's three days, so, you know, I got a lot done."

"That's cool." Sam had only the vaguest idea what cross-stitch was, but he nodded like he knew what she meant.

"You want to see?"

"Sure."

Anna pushed up from the couch and handed Sam a plastic hoop with fabric stretched tight across it like the head of a drum. The fabric itself had little squares woven into it, and on top of it were hundreds of stitches in different colors, most of them tiny x's, some of them little straight stitches strung together to make words and outlines. Only some of the pictures was done, but Sam could tell it was a house. _The Bermans_ and _Blue Earth, Minn._ were stitched underneath in fancy letters.

"Um, it's our house. I sent off a picture to this place that makes the charts. Most of the designs you can find in the stores are dumb ducks and stuff."

"It's neat." Sam looked at it for another moment before handing it back.

"It kinda takes forever, but my mom'll like it." Anna shrugged and sat back down. "Just let me know if you need anything or if you get hungry or whatever."

"Thanks."

Sam turned on the TV and flipped through the few channels--talk show, court show, soap opera, soap opera, cartoons--before giving up on it. He picked up his book and read a couple of chapters, but his feet and his finger twitched with the need to do something else, anything else. He's even be happy to clean the weapons, but he couldn't exactly do that in front of this girl, and most everything was with Dad and Dean anyway.

He kept watching Anna out of the corner of his eye. Her head bobbed a little as she worked, her thick, dark braid sliding back and forth on her shoulder as her fingers pushed the needle in and out of the fabric. Anna didn't seem to be paying any attention to what Sam was doing, so Sam gave in and pulled up a couple handfuls of the clean laundry and started folding it. He stacked the folded t-shirts and underwear on the arm of his chair and hoped she didn't pick any particularly embarrassing moments to look up.

When the laundry was all folded up and back in the basket, Sam picked up his book, only to put it down again when his thigh started itching maddeningly just under the top edge of the cast. Sam scratched his nails against the closest skin he could reach and stared down at the hated cast. Some symbols decorated the cast, though Sam didn't remember seeing anybody draw them. Dean said Dad had drawn them on while Sam was still knocked out from the pain pills, the first day he was out of the hospital. Dad wouldn't say much of anything, but Jim said they were symbols for protection, for healing. He'd brought out a book--

"Hey, Anna?" She looked up. "Can you, um, hand me that book?" Sam pointed to the old volume sitting on the coffee table just out of his reach.

"Sure." She stuck her needle into the edge of the fabric and set her work down before standing up and handing the book to Sam. "Here you go."

Sam paged through the book, reading the descriptions and uses of the symbols. Some of them were too complicated, to draw or stitch without screwing them up, but enough of them were simple straight lines and semi-circles that weren't any more complicated than the letters Anna had stitched under the picture of her house.

If they still had a house of their own, if they didn't have to live this life that nobody else understood, maybe there would be a point to stitching pretty things like Anna was making. But all they really had was each other and the car, and Dean and Dad were out there somewhere hunting with nothing more than the weapons in their hands and the clothes on their bodies. Sam dropped his hand down to the laundry basket and pulled up a plain white t-shirt, six to a pack at K-Mart.

* * *

Luckily for Sam, Anna was a sturdy girl, even if she did only come up to his shoulder. When he started shifting around on the upholstery, sending a hot jab of pain through his leg, she pulled him up from the chair and held his crutches steady until he was ready to hobble over to the first floor powder room. When Sam opened the door a couple of minutes later, she was leaning against the wall in the hallway.

"Hey, you think you can get into the kitchen for lunch?"

"Yeah." Sam nodded. "That would be cool."

She walked in front of him, moving things out of the way to make the path clear, and helping Sam get settled at the table with his bad leg propped up. Jim had left sandwich makings, and Anna just moved all of it to the table and pulled a paperback book out of the front of her jeans before sitting down. Sam distractedly put his sandwich together while watching Anna layer on the ham and cheese just so, the mustard squeezed out in a spiral on the inside of the roll.

Sam finished two sandwiches, a pile of chips and a glass of milk before he got up the nerve to ask the question that was running in circles around his head. "Hey, Anna?"

She looked up from her book. "Yeah?"

"Could you, um, show me how you do that?"

"How to what? Read and eat at the same time instead of reading and staring at me?"

Sam turned away to hide his grin. _Dean_ _would like this girl_, he thought. _Or maybe not._ "No, how to do the stitching thing?"

Anna shut her mouth tight and glared over the top of her book. "Are you making fun of me?"

"No! I mean it!"

"You want to learn how to cross-stitch?"

"Well, I don't want to make a picture of a house, but just the part with the letters? It could be on any kind of fabric, right?"

"Yeah, I mean, I guess. If you're not doing cross-stitch from a grid pattern, it doesn't make much of a difference."

"So you'll show me?"

"You sure you're serious?"

"I'm pretty much stuck here with nothing to do but read and watch Judge Judy." Sam looked straight into Anna's eyes to convince her he wasn't yanking her chain. "Please?"

"Okay." Anna nodded, smiling now, even if she looked a little confused. "I'll come back on Friday and give you a lesson."

"Why Friday? Pastor Jim isn't due back for a few hours."

"Because if you're anything like my brother was when he broke his leg, you're going to take a pain pill and then fall asleep."

"No, I can stay awake," Sam insisted, but then he moved, dislodging his foot from the slippery kitchen chair, and the pain of his casted foot hitting the floor made him bite down hard on his lip to keep from crying in front of Anna. When he opened his eyes, he saw a couple of pills and a bottle of water sitting in front of him and Anna standing next to the table with her eyebrow quirked up.

She helped him back to the easy chair, and he fell asleep before Judge Judy got back from commercials.

* * *

Dean and Dad were due back Thursday evening, and Sam spent half the day worrying about how much Dean was going to make fun of him for getting _sewing_ lessons the next day. Then Dad called Pastor Jim to say there'd been a complication that would keep them out for another day, and Sam's worry took another form. He felt like he'd spent his whole life waiting for his father to come home, then waiting for Dad and Dean both to come back to the car or come home.

Or not come home.

He'd been on a few real hunts with them, but even still he knew one of them was always stepping in front of him, keeping him from the most dangerous action, protecting him the way they had his whole life. He was fifteen, just a hair shorter than Dean, almost as tall as Dad, and he still couldn't even protect himself from falling off his bike half a block from home. But maybe, maybe, if Dean didn't laugh too hard and if Dad didn't get mad, Sam could spend some of this time stuck on his butt doing something that could protect them all.

Friday morning, before Anna showed up, Dean called to say that they were on their way back to Pastor Jim's. He sounded tired but okay. The happy, smiling people on the morning TV shows didn't make him feel sick. He had half a dozen protection symbols he thought he could manage sketched in his notebook and a spool of thick black thread borrowed from Jim.

Anna showed up in the late morning, smiling shyly and pulling the big Ziploc out of her backpack along with a few extra things.

"Hey, Sam. How's your leg?"

"It's okay. I, um, I'm sorry I fell asleep before you left the other day."

Anna grinned, shaking her head. "Don't worry, I told you my brother did the same thing. I called him narcolepsy boy for a whole month."

"Don't tell my brother that, you'll give him ideas."

"Okay. Hey, if you still want to do this stitching thing, I brought you something."

"I really do, seriously. And thank you. You didn't--"

"Don't worry about it. It was just sitting around in a box in my room at home." She handed Sam a wooden hoop only a few inches across, much smaller than the one she'd been using. "The wood ones aren't as good, but--"

"It's really cool, thank you!" Sam flashed a smile up at Anna where she stood next to his chair. "So how do I use this thing?"

"Well, you take the fabric." She dug around in her bag again and pulled out a piece of pale green fabric. "I grabbed this from my mom's scrap bag for you to practice on. You take the hoops apart like this--" She loosened the screw on top of he hoops and pulled the larger one off of the smaller one. "Then you put the fabric over the smaller one and put the bigger one over top. Tighten the screw up and keep tugging on the sides of the fabric until it's stretched tight. Sometimes you have to tighten it some more after you've been stitching for a while."

"Okay, I can do that."

"So, what do you want to stitch?"

_Runes and alchemical symbols,_ Sam thought. "Um, my name?"

"That works. It's easier to have something to follow, so you can just use a pencil or something to write it on the fabric." She dug into her bag again and handed Sam a sharp pencil.

Sam steadied the little hoop against his good leg and wrote his name--a big sweeping "S" followed by the angular lines of "AM" in smaller capitals. "Done."

"Cool." Anna nodded. "So, I brought some embroidery thread. What color do you want?" She opened up a plastic bag full of little paper-wrapped bundles of thread that all looked kind of girly and delicate.

"Can you put stuff stitched with that in the washing machine?"

"Yeah. Well, on cold." Anna shrugged.

Washing on cold wasn't going to work for Winchester laundry when it was full of dirt and sweat and more often than not some kind of blood. "Can't I use this?" Sam held up his heavy-duty thread.

"Regular thread?" Anna looked doubtful.

"Yeah, won't it work?"

Anna looked down at her bag of thread and closed it, stuffing it back in her backpack. "Sure, why not. Just maybe use two pieces cut to the same length to make the line thicker."

"Okay."

Anna showed Sam how to thread the needle and start his stitching off with a little bit of thread held down in the back. She said there were dozens of different kinds of fancy stitches, but all Sam really wanted to know was how to make a straight line. Backstitch, she said, for the way you keep going back down into the hole you came out of on the previous stitch.

It looked like a trail of little ants, forming themselves into the lines and angles of the "M" at the end of his name. It was simple, really, and by the time he finished stitching a box around his name he understood how to secure the beginning of the thread underneath his first several stitches and how to finish off the end of it without making any knots.

Sam had finished up his practice project, and Anna was perched on the wide arm of the easy chair showing Sam the weird, complicated chart she was using to make the house-picture cross-stitch design when Sam heard the front door open, followed by the heavy shuffle of boot-clad feet.

"Sammy!" Sam smiled in relief at Dean's voice, even if it did sound rougher than usual, and then his eyes went wide in panic as he shoved his little hoop down between the cushion and the arm of the chair. He looked at Anna, pleading with her silently to not say anything, relaxing only when she smirked and nodded.

"Hey, hopalong! What's--oh, hey."

Sam didn't have to look at his brother to know that he was pulling out all the stops for Anna's benefit. His panty-dropper smile, he always made a point of telling Sam.

"Hey," Anna answered, sounding apprehensive.

Sam did turn around then, and--Jesus. Only Dean could stand there with mud in his hair and a ring of bruises around his throat like he'd been half choked to death and smile like he was picking up girls at a dance.

"Hey, Dean, this is Anna. Anna, Dean's my big brother."

"Nice to meet you." Anna picked her backpack up and stuffed her things inside before zipping it shut.

"Don't leave on my account, sweetheart," Dean replied, but he slumped down on the couch and even his charm sounded a little worn.

Anna slung her bag over her shoulder. "I better be getting home. See you later, Sam."

"Thanks." Sam smiled at Anna, knowing how weird, how frightening, his family could look from the outside. "Bye, Anna."

Sam watched her go and then turned to look at Dean who had his eyes closed, his head resting on the back of the couch. Sam knew from the lines of tension in Dean's body that he was still awake. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Dean coughed a little, rubbing at his throat with the flat of his palm. "Freakin' poltergeists."

"Where's Dad?"

"Talkin' to Jim. Bringing the guns and crap in."

_You should be in college like Anna, _Sam thought, but he knew it wasn't worth saying.

Dean hauled himself up the stairs and got cleaned up, and then they all ate lunch together in the kitchen before Dean and Dad gave into their post-hunt exhaustion and went off to bed.

Jim went back to his study, and Sam went to work with his needle and thread. He had another basket of laundry next to his chair--folding laundry being the only really useful thing he could do--and all the hours until his eyes got too tired to see the right spot for his next stitch. He worked near the bottom hems of their undershirts, the part that would always be tucked inside their pants tucked again the middle parts of their bodies, hidden from prying eyes.

With a pencil and a pair of scissors borrowed from the drawer in Jim's kitchen, Sam drew and stitched pentacles and protection crosses, Algiz runes and the alchemical symbol for salt into plain white cotton. The stretchy shirts were kind of a pain to sew on, but he took his time, and the stitches lay flat and smooth against the fabric. Sam's fingertips turned pink and tender from pressing hard around the needle, but all he could think about was the bruise around Dean's neck and all the nights they'd spent waiting for Dad to come home.

Sam thought he would show the shirts to Dean first, get his help to make Dad okay with the idea, but he fell asleep in his chair and woke up in the dim, early morning light to movement and the sound of his father's in-drawn breath nearby.

Dad was standing next to the laundry basket, holding a newly-stitched shirt in his hands. He looked down at Sam, his face serious, and Sam looked back, refusing to apologize, not even with his eyes. Dad just looked back down at the shirt and nodded.

"This is good, Sam," he said. "Thank you."

Sam looked down at his hands, wondering if he were dreaming, and when he looked up Dad was gone.

Later in the morning, Dean took his shirts with a smirk and a predictable "Samantha," but then he spotted Sam on his trip up the stairs and helped him take a real shower.

Sam's leg was out of the cast by the end of July, and by the time they had an apartment in a new town with a new school his leg was mostly back to normal. He continued stitching, though, keeping up with new shirts as they replaced old ones. In the back seat of the Impala, in the passenger seat after Dad bought the truck, he added one more layer of protection that he hoped would keep them alive long enough to finish all of Dad's work and get to the normal life he could only imagine.

* * *

On the bus to Stanford, his heart still pounding from the last, vicious fight with his father, Sam pulled his shirts out his bag one by one and cut the stitches with a pocket knife. He left his jeans and the floor of the Greyhound bus littered with tiny pieces of black and red thread, and by the time he put his clothes into the plain, sturdy dresser in his dorm room there were only tiny holes in the white cotton to suggest what had been there.

For three years, Sam only used his needle and thread to keep his clothes in one piece. He almost forgot that he had once walked around every day with shirts stitched with protection symbols tucked against his belly and the small of his back.

Dean came to Palo Alto, and Sam returned to hunting, and the only stitches he made were in his brother's skin. They drove hard on the trail of their father and every evil thing Dean wanted to hunt, and torn clothes were thrown away, replaced using the credit cards that always found their way to Dean's wallet.

Then they hunted the Rawheads, and Sam had to watch his brother breaking, dying. And there wasn't any blood, wasn't anything to stitch closed, but he had to sit in the hotel room and watch Dean tremble in his sleep, his face gray and drawn. He had to sit, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for Dean to die or live, waiting for his life to unravel, so he took out his needle and thread and dug his little hoop out of the trunk.

They had a lot of new shirts; he had work to do.


End file.
